Full text of podcast: Cometh the Horsemen: Pandemic, Famine, War with Michael Yon.
In this podcast, Michael Yon, one of America’s youngest Green Berets at 19 years old, joins Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss the current state of affairs across the globe.
TRANSCRIPT:
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Hi everybody. It’s my pleasure and privilege today to be speaking with correspondent Michael Yon. I reached out to Michael because I’ve been extremely interested in the European civil protests, specifically those centering at the moment in the Netherlands. Inspired in no small part by the Canadian truckers convoy. Those protests are receiving short shrift and minimal coverage in what has become to known as the legacy media, which is more and more in a collusional relationship, let’s say with the globalist utopians who are attempting to guide our destiny so destructively and unsuccessfully.
I reach out to Michael because I want to find out to the degree that I can what’s going on, particularly in the Netherlands and more broadly in Europe and around the world. And he’s a cardinal person to talk to in this regard and he’s a very interesting person in his own right for all sorts of reasons which we’ll get into as we progress.
Michael was one of America’s youngest Green Berets. That’s not an easy thing to manage at 19 years old. He spent more than half his life overseas in more than 80 countries. So he’s been everywhere, man, and has seen many things. Mr. Yon is also the author of three books published in the United States, including Moment of Truth in Iraq, 2016 and three others in Japan, covering, among other topics, the present and developing information war with China. He is America’s most experienced combat correspondent. Not necessarily a title for the faint of heart, let’s say most recently, as I said, and this is the proximal reason for this discussion, Michael has been tracking and covering the rising tide of civil disobedience in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe.
So thank you Michael, very much for coming in to talk to me today.
MICHAEL YON: Yes sir Jordan, and thank you for inviting me on. I’ve watched your show for years now. It’s incredible to come on yeah. And you mentioned the Canadian truckers. Their courage and their inspiration cannot be understated. Courage is courageous as is cowardice. And so we must display courage.
Recently, some months ago, earlier this year, I drove from California to Washington, DC with American truckers who were inspired by Canadian truckers, and they were flying Canadian flags. All these are American truckers and Americans over bridges. I must have seen hundreds of thousands flying almost as many Canadian flags as Americans. You may have seen it on the news while the news sort of blockaded it.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: No, we never see anything like that on the news in Canada because yeah, our media is so subsidized by the government that we — anything that runs against government dictates, and I hate to say that about a country like Canada is just minimally or minimally covered or not covered at all. I had no idea that the American truckers were flying Canadian flags. You’d think that would be news in Canada, because isn’t it news when Canada becomes interesting?
And in fact, I know almost nothing about the truckers convoy in the US to Washington, and I do try to follow the news.
MICHAEL YON: Jordan, the truckers convoy in the United States from California to Washington, it was actually pretty massive. And I was there every step of the way. And so many Canadian flags, you wouldn’t believe it. Hanging off bridges, sides of the roads, even in blue states. And it was all inspiration from Canada.
And so, yeah, again, courage is courageous, cowardice is courageous. And the Americans were very proud to follow the lead of Canadians. And so, again, this is spreading across the world.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah. Well, that’s amazing.
MICHAEL YON: Don’t even know it, do they? They don’t even know it because they don’t know — the Canadian truckers to know it.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: No, they have no idea. And that’s really sad that we’re in a situation where we could have that be something that we don’t know. Well, that’s part of what puts us in the situation that we’re in. Okay, so you were with the American truckers when they went to Washington. What sort of effect do you think they had?
MICHAEL YON: It was galvanizing, of course. It’s just one battle of many of awareness at that point. I spent so much time with the truckers because in every country that I go to, I want to know what the farmers think. I go straight to farmers. I want to know what people like truckers think, law enforcement, military, that sort of thing. The basic pulse of the countries that I go to.
And so, yeah, it had a good effect, certainly. As you know, this is a long road. You’ve been talking about this for years, and you’ve been fighting this battle for years, and you know, it’s a knock down, drag out fight, and it goes on. But you’ve mentioned, I’ve watched some of your recent programs. You acknowledge that we’re actually making progress against the WEF, and they call them WEF here, the World Economic Forum, the WEF in Netherlands. They call it WEF.
We are making progress. No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, and now we are the enemy for WEF obviously, and now that millions of people are waking up, it seems like by the week at this point, WEF is suddenly in for an actual, real fight. And so that’s why I was just in Mexico tracking migrants, as I’ve been doing. This is all part of a larger jungle, let’s say. It’s not just about farmers, it’s not just about truckers, it’s not just about the information war, obviously is PhD level warfare. All of the substrate for everything going on is information war, as you know.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so you said we are the enemy, let’s say. And so who do you mean by we, and what do you think the fight is about? How would you characterize it and who do you think, so to speak, is on the other side? You mentioned the WEF, and of course they’re enemies of the moment, or what would you call it, villains of the moment, and I think deservedly so in many ways. But how do you characterize this battle? Why do you think of it as a battle? And what does it look like from your perspective when you’re talking to the truckers and the farmers and the law enforcement types?
MICHAEL YON: Well, actually it’s intergenerational, as you know. We could go back to the 1920s and talk about Russian information war. And even earlier, 1879, Grant was talking about it when he was in Paris. This isn’t something that started last week or even last generation, but some of our biggest opponents at this point are certainly WEF and CCP. Of course, I’ve written three books on CCP information war. Unfortunately, they are only in Japanese language.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s the Chinese Communist Party, for those of you who aren’t up on the acronyms. And we’d be hard pressed to find a more devious enemy than the Chinese Communist Party. If you’re a supporter of the CCP and its machinations, then you’re either woefully ignorant to a degree that’s almost incomprehensible or malevolent to the core or some appalling combination of both.
And it’s so strange to hear you talk about the CCP and the WEF in the same breath, because you wouldn’t think at all that those would be natural allies, given that the WEF hypothetically is on the side of the planet and the west and civilization and the CCP are nothing but tyrannical, war mongering, North Korean wannabes.
MICHAEL YON: That’s an important point. They’re not necessarily on the same side, but they’re part of the same jungle. I mean, these are two serious opponents. There’s nobody that actually runs the jungle, per se. Right?
And one of the massive opponents, obviously, is Chinese Communist Party. And they are excellent. They are masters of information war. Again, I’ve written three books on this that are only in Japanese language. I wrote them in English, but I was asked to publish books by a Japanese publisher in Japan about this, which I did.
And in an attempt to wake up Japanese to the intense information war that they are undergoing, I got kicked out of Hong Kong in 2020 by the obviously, the Chinese Communist Party, because I was covering the fighting there for seven months and getting my share of rubber bullets and tear gas constantly. Those things do sting, but they’re not quite like bullets.
The bottom line is the Chinese Communist Party, their information ground game is so intense. For instance, I went to Nanjing to look at the Rape of Nanjing Museum. This museum — I’ve studied museum warfare in numerous countries, for instance, Indonesia, Malaysia. Long list. And I’ll often go to museums to look for hints of behind the scenes influence.
And you see in The Rape of Nanjing Museum in Nanjing, China, that thing must have cost $50 million. I don’t know how much it cost, but to be directionally accurate, let’s just assign a number $50 million. And when you show up there in the morning, there’s dozens of buses filled with school children, and they go in their different color shirts for the different buses and the different flags. And I was the only foreigner there, to my knowledge.
And when you’re about halfway through the museum, you’re like, wow, that was the biggest museum. That’s like the Louvre. It’s not quite that big, but it has quite a large museum. But then you realize you’re only halfway through it. Now, as a mental health expert, you know that there’s two components to hatred, and those are anger and disgust. That’s like H20. If you can combine anger and disgust, you will get hatred every single time as you go through that. I’m a writer, so I study these things as well.
As you go through the Nanjing Museum, it’s all about hatred and disgust focused towards Japanese, right? If you want to know what a country’s future plans are, you watch their information ground game. And the information ground game against Japan is a pure hatred. For instance, they ring the sirens several times a year in Nanjing, as if there’s an air raid going on. I spent quite a bit of time in China all over the place.
At night time, if you’re in the hotel room, you’ll always see the movies. Here comes the drunken Japanese soldier again with his uniform, and he kills the Chinese parents and rapes the girl, and he staggers out drunk. There’s that movie. And then next comes the second movie that night. Same thing. It’s the same story every single night, seven days a week.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: I don’t I don’t suppose they show drunken Cultural Revolution students from the 1960s killing people and destroying all the last vestiges of Chinese traditional culture.
MICHAEL YON: No, sir, obviously not. And you can see, for instance, in Okinawa now — one of the things that I mean, you’ve talked about these things before. I have an office in Thailand. They’re trying to split Thailand into three different parts. I was out with the Maoist in Nepal for about a year. One of the things that they did to help the Maoist eventually win, if you want to call it winning, is to get everybody to speak their own languages, right? Everybody to go with their own divide and conquer.
When I was recently in Morocco, same thing. You see a new Berber language written on the road signs, which is like a new made up language. I mean, Berber is not a made up language, but the written component is. And I see these things all over the place. It’s been happening down in Colombia. I was down in Colombia last year with a Senator Maria Cabal. And Maria said, why are they trying to get all the indigenous people to speak their own languages and to fight each other and to fight us? And of course, Colombia just fell as well, right?
So this is the same thing that they’re doing in Panama. I’ve spent a lot of time in Panama recently. I’m watching that closely. You see, Panama is melting down right now. And obviously there’s a Panama Canal there that’s of some significance, to put it mildly. Also, Panama is a major invasion route to the United States. I’ve spent many months I took two congressmen there last year into the Darien Gap, one of the most dangerous jungles in the world; actually I can’t believe they went out there, but they went deep into the Darien Gap and I showed them exactly this invasion that’s coming through Asia and Africa and South America, up through Colombia, up through Panama and going straight to the United States, right.
People from about 140 countries completely unvetted. And it’s growing. It’s becoming massive. I was there when Mayorkas landed right in front of me in his blackhawk helicopters some months ago, expanding our program there for this invasion route. So all of these things fit together, Jordan, as you know, the information war —
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: How do you stop from becoming paranoid? And, I mean, you’re behind the scenes looking at all these strange things, this web of intrigue on multiple fronts. How do you protect yourself against paranoia and conspiratorial thinking? And this is a very dead serious question because it’s very hard not to take on the trappings of your surroundings. And when you’re constantly looking at intrigue and malevolence behind the scenes, I can’t see how that could help but color your entire worldview. And so, given that, why do you think people should trust your perspective and believe that what you’re seeing is veridical and not, like, tilted by your own what would you call it, preoccupations and situational peculiarities?
MICHAEL YON: Well, that’s an excellent question, and I’ve asked myself that many times because self auditing is essential in this line of work. And I do think I’ve had a sort of self vaccination when I was younger on this particular topic. Because since I was a child, I was always into science, especially physics. And basically I was failing school because all I wanted to do was study physics. And you can never waste a moment of your time studying mathematics and that sort of thing, right.
When you start off, when you’re nine or ten years old, basically enthralled by the sciences, and you built a fact-based world around your life, you build self auditing into your thinking processes, right? You’re always questioning whether, is this just a perception? Am I right or wrong on this sort of thing? Obviously, I’m always –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So part of it’s scientific rationality, do you have people around you, friends and family, that also help keep you in check?
MICHAEL YON: Well, I’ve never really been highly conspiratorial to begin with. I mean, for instance, when I own the museum warfare, that was brought up to me by someone actually a military officer, former now that I work with closely, and he flew over to Thailand to brief me on it maybe eight years ago or something. And he briefed me on it quite a while. And then we started flying around to different countries like Indonesia and Malaysia and looking at these museums, and I said, wow, this is clearly cookie cutter museums. It’s clearly designed to cause hatred against Japanese.
And when we look at good Lord, I could go on for literally I’ve written three books about it, so I’ll have to self edit there so I could go on forever. But there is clearly a larger organization around this museum warfare, and it’s definitely centered in China. For instance, when I was at Penang, there was the curator of the museum. I said, wow, what a nice museum you’ve got here. Of course, it was all about hating Japanese. And he said, oh, I just got back from Beijing, and he said, I was invited there because they enjoyed my museum so much. And I said, oh, really? Do you have any photos? And he pulls out this book under the desk. Actually, it’s a large book. I photographed the whole book, and it’s got photos of all the curators from all these different museums, such as Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas. Right. And it’s got all the names in there. I photographed everything, checked out every name in the book. Right. It took a lot of research, but we can clearly see this is part of a very sophisticated information operation. That is just part of it.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, well, let’s turn to the WEF, and let’s turn to the global utopia and to what happened in Canada. The Canadian truckers here, they were pushing back against what they regarded as unwarranted government overreach and intrusion into their private lives on the COVID front, fundamentally. And I was a supporter of the truckers right from day one. I believe, like you do, that truckers and farmers and the men, particularly the men and the women who work on those frontline occupations have a pragmatic wisdom that the intellectual types often don’t.
And I’ve also noted, too, that the intellectual socialist types really like the working class in principle, but they actually don’t like the working class as such because they tend not to hold the same utopian intellectual views that the globalists do. And so we saw that in spades in Canada. And I’ve seen my government take a turn for the worse on multiple dimensions in Canada. That’s jaw dropping in its continuity and depth. And it’s clearly the case that Canadians haven’t woken up to that yet, although perhaps they’re starting to. And a huge part of that is this appalling and unconscionable media collusion.
And so now we see something similar happening in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, and we should let everyone know. And you have to listen to this. This is so important. The Netherlands is the world’s second biggest exporter of agricultural products. This little tiny postage stamp of a country that was scraped out of the ocean has managed to put itself together so that it can not only feed itself, but so that it’s a major agricultural supplier worldwide. It’s a phenomenal accomplishment. We should be so happy with the Dutch farmers that we can hardly stand ourselves. And instead the courts in particular have mandated that the farmers be scuttled and the government, their own government, has basically come out right out and said, well, because you guys pollute so much, we have to crack down on you, as well as reducing the speed limits of our cars, which is an author appalling move.
And we’re sorry, but a lot of you are going to have to go out of business. But to make an omelet, a few eggs has to be broken. And as the president of Greenpeace in the Netherlands said recently, well, we know we’re not going to combat climate change, the climate change emergency, without inconveniencing a few people. And now there’s what, 40,000 truckers in the Netherlands who are up in arms, and I believe 100,000 people have protested in Spain. And this is spreading into Germany and into the fishermen in the Netherlands as well who are also being pressured by these utopian types.
And so how do you tie that into what happened in Canada and the US. And what do you think is going on?
MICHAEL YON: Well, it’s all part of this larger World Economic Forum attacks on us, of course. And by the way, I lived in Europe for six years in [periodic avant] — I lived four years in Germany, I lived two years in Poland, and I’ve been all over Europe. Right. But mostly not recently. Mostly I’ve been in Asia recently and other places.
But yeah, it’s clear that, for instance, when I was recently in Mexico following the migrants just streaming — in May alone, we had about 310,000 illegally crossed into the United States in one month.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: How many?
MICHAEL YON: Roughly 310,000 known cross just in May. Right. I’m not sure what that number is this last month? I don’t know the number yet, but the bottom line is it’s increasing at a very high rate. And this human osmotic pressure, I call it HOP, human osmotic pressure. The push and pull of migration is greatly fueled by one information campaigns, which I’ve seen in Colombia, for instance, on CNN, encouraging people to go north.
And also, obviously, another thing that causes HOP is war, famine, pandemic, and also the economic negative pressure, which would draw you into another place. Right. So there’s a positive pressure that pushes you out, and the negative pressure that pushes you in, pulls you in. And this is really dramatically expanding. You can see this also in Europe as you know, they’re being overwhelmed with hungry mouths, actually, as we go into a global famine, which I’ve been warning about.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, okay, let’s talk about this global famine, because I see they’re coming in the fall in a big way. And so my sense is, well, partly because of the Ukraine conflict and the fact that we’re wiping out a big chunk of the world’s wheat supply and fertilizer supply, that we’re going to be putting about 150 million people under intense food pressure really starting this fall, I think that’s when it’s going to kick in.
And my sense is, well, there’s no way that can happen without mass migration pressure on Europe may be of a scale that makes the last migration crisis look like virtually nothing. And so am I being paranoid about that? You seem to be thinking along the same lines. And you said you’ve seen this coming for about three years.
MICHAEL YON: I think you’re understating it, actually. So what’s going to happen in the fall? I started warning in January of 2020, actually, and I’ve warned every day since. And at this point, I warn about half a dozen times a day.
Let’s talk about PanFaWar first. Pandemic, famine, war, the triangle of death, they always go together. If you get a big war or a big pandemic or a big famine, you’ll get the other two. You get one, you get the other two. It’s three musketeers and all of these things, any one of them creates the HOP – human osmotic pressure. So these things go together.
So when I saw this — I was one of the very first alerting on the pandemic in January, in mid to somewhere around January ‘19, I think I started warning about of pandemic, and so immediately, having studied war for so many years, not just kinetic war and the shootouts and all that. I did that for years, back when I was quite skinny and running around out in the wars and all that.
But there’s also information war, which is the PhD level of warfare, and then there’s these other components that people must study if they’re going to be a serious student of war, which is migration, pandemic and famine. They always go together, period. Right?
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay. So let me ask you a question about that. So my sense was that on the Pandemic front, that because we disrupted the supply chains and we have by no means fixed that in the least, there’s a shortage. You can’t get a car in Canada, you can’t get a motorbike. You can’t get a personal watercraft. You can’t get paper and cardboard for books. There’s a massive backlog and line up for everything.
I know that one container ship in five is now snared at a port. And so I know what happens when you put pressure on the supply chain, the people who suffer for that the most are the people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. And so those are going to be people that are barely hanging on in developing countries, especially in North Africa, that’ll be my guess, where this is going to have the biggest effects.
And so if you show a 1% increase in unemployment, you get a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalization. And that’s because there’s a lot of people who are just barely making ends meet. And then if you double the cost of necessities, like energy or let’s say fertilizer, or we could even put in food, then you’re going to produce a tremendous amount of economic pressure on these people, tilt them into starvation.
And so we’ve seen what’s happened in Sri Lanka, which is just an absolute, bloody, major, significant, ongoing catastrophe. 21 million people in Sri Lanka. There’s no way we’re going to be able to feed them in any real sense for any long period of time. So all that eco movement forward on the Sri Lankan front is going to ensure that those poor, starving people are going to eat every goddamn animal in that entire country to stave off starvation. And then they’re going to burn everything for fuel because what the hell else are they going to do?
So this idea that we can make people poor, hungry, cold or hot by scaling back food production and disrupting energy supplies and that’s somehow going to save the planet, is as backwards of conception as any dimwit could possibly formulate. Okay, so what do you think is going to happen in the fall?
MICHAEL YON: Massive famine. And I went to Sri Lanka four, five, six years ago to have a look see. I’m often just going and looking and checking the police and the food supply. And there was plenty of food. Sri Lanka had so much food, it was just like in Cheap and Plentiful. Right. And then the next thing you know, here we go. Now –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: That was doing well.
MICHAEL YON: Yeah. One thing about famine, famine creates famine in the same way that war creates war and fire creates fire, famine creates famine. So when we go into these initial phases of famine, you’ll see immediately, obviously, price controls will start to be enforced. This happens every time. It’s happening right now in Panama in the last 48 hours. Right. Price controls on gasoline and other things.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Oh, yeah.
MICHAEL YON: A lot of violence now in Panama. In fact, just minutes before you and I came on, I was talking with a friend in Panama about the current situation. That’s how close I keep tabs on Panama for various reasons. One is the Panama Canal. And so and — and another thing is, is for instance, when people are hungry, that, as you know, within 48 hours they’re going to hit the streets, right? And they’ll start robbing the stores. They’ll start robbing the, the trucks and the trains and the boats. And so then supplies stop going.
Governments always start taking food from the farmers. Without exception. In my study over the years, governments always go for the farmers. Like in Egypt recently forcing the Egyptian farmers to sell to only approved warehouses, that sort of thing. So people start robbing from the farmers as well, right?
And then the farmers say, hey, I’m either bankrupt or I’m not making any money. And so the farmers stop farming. So that’s how you see we get into the second season of this, right? And so the famine creates more famine, just like fire creates fire. And in famine, let’s say you have 20 million people that are hungry in Sri Lanka, and as their nutritional resources diminish, so too does their physical resilience. And now they’re open to disease.
Many of the people that die in famines actually die from things like they call them famine fevers. One of those is Typhus, another is relapsing fevers, cholera, which is not a famine fever waterborne, of course. Anyway, the bottom line is many of the people, if not most, who die during famines are actually from disease. And then this causes that human osmotic pressure. And these sorts of things often lead to more war. Right.
So it’s a recursive sort of the factors just keep — it’s almost a fission reaction, right?
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, sure. Positive feedback loop. Yeah. Runaway predo distribution problem, runaway catastrophe. Yeah, I get it. Positive feedback loops emerging everywhere. And why do you think what are the factors that are driving the reemergence of the famine? You said there’s a lot of instability in Central America, and so we’re going to keep an eye out there. Obviously, Sri Lanka has collapsed entirely. And there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that a major part of the reason that Sri Lanka collapsed is because the globalist utopians gathered the reins of government in Sri Lanka because it was actually developing at quite a rate. And as you said, it would have a lot of food and not a bad general income level just a few years ago.
So this wasn’t a catastrophic country to begin with. It was a country on the move upward, and it was completely scuttled by these globalist plans. And so what’s contributing to the developing famine right now? And where do you think it’s going to be most intense?
MICHAEL YON: Where will it be the most intense? That’s something I think about every single day. One of the things I’ve learned in wars and then the study of war is whatever you think will probably turn out to be wrong.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah.
MICHAEL YON: You know this, I watch so many of your programs, the systems that emerge will present themselves in due course. What we can see is when I talk with Lara Logan, the famous correspondent, she’ll say they’ve been talking about 1.2 billion — World Economic Forum — have been talking about 1.2 billion people forced to migrate. They’ve been talking about that for years. And it’s true.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah. And they’re going to blame it. They’re bloody well going to blame it on climate change. You watch. That’s what they’re going to do.
MICHAEL YON: Absolutely.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: You bet. 1.2 billion. So my estimation of 150 million is you think is optimistic?
MICHAEL YON: I think highly optimistic. I would not be surprised — Jordan, I would not be surprised if by 2025, if a billion people aren’t dead, I mean, we’re really heading into the most epic famines that have ever happened in human history.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: I was looking at an Economist cover the other day, the Economist magazine, and it said 20 million people saved by COVID vaccine. And I thought, yeah, you bastards, for every million persons that you saved with the lockdowns and the whole vaccination scam — not the vaccination scam, but the, but the pandemic panic, you’re probably going to kill 50 million because of supply chain disruptions and postponed starvation.
And so, you know, that’s part of the problem with turning political decisions over to the medical experts, is that, well, we save some people with the left hand and we doom 100 more with the right hand. And there is a lag. We basically tried to shut down the world’s economy for two years, as if we could do that because, well, look, everything is so plentiful, isn’t it? Doesn’t it matter at all that people aren’t going to go to work? It turns out that it actually matters a lot.
And so what are the factors right now that are contributing to this emergent food insecurity problem? Why are these people who were being fed not being fed now?
MICHAEL YON: Let’s talk about energy. Energy is another kill shot. This highly ill advised war in Ukraine. I was in Lithuania last year warning about this over and over and over. I was down in Morocco with my friend, war correspondent Chuck Holton, and we called up Frontex, which is like the European Border Patrol, you might say they’re headquartered in Warsaw and they said Belarus, Lukashenko, the dictator there, is pushing migrants into Lithuania. And I had been with the Lithuanian Army in Afghanistan. I called them up, I said, what’s going on? And they said, hey, come on up. So I flew from Morocco to Vilnius, Lithuania, and I had full access to their elected officials, intelligence, the camps for the migrants and army, the whole thing. So for almost a month, right.
So I was very well aware that Russia is up to something, and I was publishing that. Right? And so we’ve gone into this war on Ukraine, right? And Russia is just of course, obviously, Nordstream is cut, right? Will it be turned back on? And now, as you probably are aware, we just had –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: I wouldn’t turn it on if I was Putin.
MICHAEL YON: I wouldn’t either. And even Trump warned them about this years ago. Love him or hate him, he was very clear about it. And we just had an explosion roughly a month ago at a Texas port, an LNG facility, which is critical, right? We were supplying liquid natural gas to Europe. This would have helped. You need this for the Haber Bosch process to create many of the fertilizers, right? That natural gas is very important. Then we had an explosion and pipeline explosion roughly two weeks ago in Texas. And then we just had another natural gas problem at a plant in Oklahoma. We’ve had three Oklahoma, two in Texas, right?
Meanwhile, they’re being shut off from Russia. And we’ve got a potential war brewing here, for instance, between Iran and Israel. Imagine where that could go on energy supplies. We’re looking –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so let’s look at that for a minute. So I’m going to lay down a proposition here for all of you who are listening. If you are a friend to the poor and the oppressed and the hungry, the number one thing you want to do is drive energy prices as low as they possibly can be on every front that you possibly can manage. And that bloody well includes coal and petroleum and natural gas. And then we could add nuclear to that. And if you want to throw renewables in for the tiny percentage that they account for, you could do that too.
But because energy is equivalent to work, and because work is equivalent to food and shelter, if you make energy expensive, what you do is you starve the poor. And you don’t have to starve them very much before they become desperate and things fall apart. And then we fall into these positive feedback loops that Michael has been describing. And so when you hear these bloody globalist utopians talk about the necessity for higher energy costs, you remember that that comes directly at the cost of the world’s poor.
Christia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, two weeks ago had the unmitigated, and I would say quasi demonic gall to announce publicly that $8 a gallon gasoline in Canada was actually probably a good thing because Canadians should be reminded nonstop just how severe the climate crisis is every time they fill up their cars. And that’s perfectly bloody fine unless you’re living on the edge of your economic capability. And the fact that you can’t afford to fill up your car anymore puts you into unemployment and food deprivation and relationship to your children, and that’s in the rich west and now in the Europe. We’re so goddamn stupid on our energy policy because of these idiot environmental schemes that we’ve made ourselves pathologically reliant on the Russians, and we’re going to bloody well see what that costs us. And I know the Germans are burning coal again because their switch, massively expensive and counterproductive switch to so called renewals has been another catastrophe.
And so now God only knows how expensive energy is going to become. And that’s directly related to the provision of the famines that Michael is talking about. So get ready for this, folks, because it’s coming down the pipes.
MICHAEL YON: Jordan, Germans are collecting wood right now, as much as they can get. They realize this can be a very cold winter, right?
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, this is going to be a very well, that’s what I saw at the globalist utopian mantra, let the poor freeze in the dark. That’s how you save the planet. Yeah, no kidding.
MICHAEL YON: If anything that can destroy the European Union, that’ll be it. If Germany collapses, it’s over. Right. And many of us have been looking at Greece and Italy and Portugal and Spain for years, wondering which one would go first. I thought it would probably be Greece, but we saw Italy looks like they might be the first to fall off the tree. Right. And probably the other three Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece or Italy already. Greece probably will be soon to follow. These are the weak canaries in this coal mine…
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Mean it’ll fall out of the European Union?
MICHAEL YON: Oh, yeah. And now, look, Putin has just cut the gas for the annual maintenance. And of course, we’ve got Zelensky over there saying that Canada should not send back the turbine to Germany. And he’s inserting himself, basically, into the life and death of hundreds of millions of people. Zelensky the actor, we’ve never seen something like this. If things continue, it’s all about conditions. People often talk about sparks. What will be the spark? Sparks.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, no kidding.
MICHAEL YON: Sparks is an amateur question. Professionals talk about conditions. There’s always sparks. And the conditions that are being set now, whether it be the inputs of fertilizer, fungicides, pesticides, all the other chemicals that go into agriculture, the energy, diesel, LNG, just so many factors that are really going the wrong direction. Transport. You know, famines in the past have generally been — recently I found a 1910 1911 Britannica, and I looked up famine. I was just seeing what they thought about famine back then. And it was a very wisely written entry in the Britannica. And they said the entry posited that large famines are probably a thing of the past, because now we have modern transportation. Obviously, some of the largest famines were yet to come, because the largest famines are always caused not by locusts and drought. They’re caused by people taking advantage of these things. Right. Like the Holodomor in 1932-33 in Ukraine. Very good book on that called Red Famine –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: where 6 million people were starved to death by the Communists and where women were shot if they went out into the fields that had already been harvested to glean individual kernels of grain by hand to feed their children. If they didn’t turn over those individual kernels of grain, then they were summarily executed. And that was fun in the Communist Soviet Union. Only 6 million Ukrainians!
You’re exactly right on the famine front, as we like to think, that the reason that people starve is because we don’t have enough food. And at the moment, the reason that people starve is because we’re stupid and often malevolent.
Okay? So Germany is in trouble. And a huge part of this, as far as I’m concerned, is because of these unbelievably, ill advised energy policies that were hypothetically put in place to aid the planet’s movement towards lower climate transformation. And fair enough, maybe we have some concern on that front, but this absurd panicking combined with post hawk central planning and this insane notion that we can somehow make energy more expensive without producing cascading sequences of catastrophes is naive beyond belief and malevolent, at least in part. So now Germany is in trouble because they’re hyper reliant on the Russians.
And so now back to the Dutch farmers. Now, the Dutch government put pressure on the farmers recently because a legislative body that was EU controlled, that’s my understanding, decided in favor of an idiot environmental group. And the Court compelled the government that’s a non legislative body, by the way. The Court compelled the government to act in relation to the farmers. And apparently the farmers have had enough of this. And so what’s happening in Holland and elsewhere in Europe on the Revolutionary Front, let’s say, what do you think their motives are and what effect has this had in Holland?
MICHAEL YON: Wow, this is a big topic. As you know, Dutch farmers are probably the finest and most efficient in the world. Right. And practically no Dutch people seem to know that, which is extraordinary. And they don’t realize how important their farmers are to the world as the second largest food exporter in the world.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s a miracle, right. Because how big is Holland? It’s a tiny country. You can drive across it in like 3 hours.
MICHAEL YON: Meanwhile, Mark Rutte, the prime minister, is the teacher’s pet of Klaus Schwab. I mean, he’s even more favorited than Trudeau. Right? which is pretty hard to do.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s right. That’s a hard contest to win on the appalling front.
MICHAEL YON: Yeah. And so the bureaucrats in Brussels, they are ruling by decree. And of course, it has nothing to do with nitrogen. Here, they’re talking about nitrogen. It has nothing to do with nitrogen. It has nothing to do with ammonium. It has to do with numerous things. One is taking the land, just as happened with Stalin in Ukraine, labeling the farmers kulaks, the Ukrainian farmers and attacking and killing them. Here in Netherlands, there is an information campaign to make the farmers look like bad guys here as well. I mean, these are the new kulaks, right?
Meanwhile, let me tell you something about farmers. I have spent more than half of my life overseas, more than 80 countries, a lot of war. I’m always going out with farmers, right? And I’ve never met farmers from any country I can’t get along with. Even Taliban farmers had common sense. At one point, I’m in Afghanistan, out with one guy, he’s growing opium and he’s growing poppy for opium. And he said he’s showing me the bugs on his plant. He said, Your helicopters drop these bugs on our plants at night to kill our plants. I said, well, no, sir, we should be doing that because you’re creating opium, but we don’t we’re not that smart. And he goes, yes, you’re not that smart, and then go after teeth.
But anyway, even at one point, I’m out with — because the two years I spent in Afghanistan, one year was with various militaries, like British and American militaries and Lithuanians and that sort of thing. And another year was just alone, running around out with farmers and whatnot.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Farmers are so much — they’re like truckers in that regard. They’re so much in contact — the electricians and contractors and carpenters. That’s why Christ was a carpenter, by the way, because if you’re not honest, you can’t build a house that stands up, man. And he wasn’t a PhD sociologist, he was a carpenter. And those people who have to have their hands in the dirt and their feet on the ground, they have a sense about how the world works that’s practical and embodied, that the pinheaded, academic globalists lack entirely and are also often incredibly jealous of.
And so in Canada, it was the farmers and the truckers who rose up the misogynists and the bigots and the racists, in our Prime Minister’s terms. And then that’s triggered these co occurring protests in the US and in Holland. And now it isn’t easy to get farmers upset either, because those tractors that they bring to the protests, those things are bloody expensive, and most of the farmers don’t own them. They have to finance them. And so they’re running on very thin margins, three to 5% a year generally. And you have to be one canny person to run a big farm in the modern economy. You have to be paying attention to all sorts of unbelievably, complicated and sophisticated things.
And so when the farmers have been pushed to the point where they’re willing to take time away from their farms to spray manure on the government’s steps, it’s probably time to listen. So I agree with you on that front 100%. Okay, so you’re in Holland and you’re talking to the farmers, and what are they telling you?
MICHAEL YON: You basically are reading my mind, which is very difficult to do. So when I was just in Mexico and I saw the Dutch farmers, I know a lot of people in Netherlands, and so when I was getting inside, they were acting up. I was like, Dutch farmers are actually protesting.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, right. Man, the last people you’d ever expect.
MICHAEL YON: So that’s why I jumped on the airplane, because if the Dutch farmers are acting up, I need to come over here and hear what they had to say.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s for sure.
MICHAEL YON: So let’s talk about that. First of all, clearly, the WEF they call it WEF here in Netherlands. The World Economic Forum is trying to control food supply. Right. That is production and distribution. One of the ways to do this is, as Stalin did with and Mao did in China and Stalin did in Ukraine and Russia, is to take the farms away from the traditional farmers and then put your farmers on that land.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: To what end? Michael? I read about the notion that we need to turn to plant based foods and insect based protein in the future, and that meat production and all the cow methane are contributing to the degradation of the environment. But do you see this as a plan or just as a part of the globalist utopian, ideologically blind stupidity? Because, I mean, farmers do pollute. There is runoff from fertilizer. It does cause algal blooms, for example, in the water. And these are problems. I don’t think they’re insurmountable problems, but you’re pointing to something that’s more malevolent and deeper and programmatic, and we don’t want to go there without questioning that presumption. I always think if you can explain it with stupidity, you don’t have to explain it with malevolence.
MICHAEL YON: Well, as you know, be careful with that one, because sometimes we do have to go to malevolence.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: I know we do.
MICHAEL YON: And I watch your show enough to know you know exactly why this is happening. And let’s talk about this. If the Dutch farmers, let’s take this as a premise, are the most efficient in the world, let’s just say they’re the second most efficient. Why would you knock them out of the south to get somebody else to produce the food where Indian farmers — I mean, who’s going to produce this food in a much less efficient way that would create even more pollution? This is clearly about control.
Also, there’s something that you never hear in any press that I’ve heard in the United States is the Tristate City is this smart city that they’re proposing to build between the TriStates or Belgium, Netherlands and Germany. So this mega city, basically, that would take up all this farmland in that area and which would bring huge amounts of more people into this area. Right. So the Tristate City is something you don’t hear much about, but that’s another part of this plan. There was a fire about maybe ten days ago I went to it right after the next morning, and it’s at a picnic distribution center, which is there was an investment, $600 million into this picnic food distribution center from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, coincidentally, and it burned down. And so that brought a little raised my eyebrows. Why did that thing just burn down? There’s many of them.
There’s others in Netherlands. They’re growing. But the bottom line is Bill Gates is buying up farmland, as you know, all over the place.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: I know he is the biggest private landowner in the United States right now, and the land that he’s buying up, he’s taking out of food production. And it seems to me because he’s obsessed about meat production, at least in part, doesn’t believe that that’s part of a sustainable future. But I do share your skepticism. It’s the same thing happens on the bloody energy front. It’s like, well, Australia won’t build coal generating electrical plants, but they’ll ship their bloody coal to China, where they’re going to build much dirtier plants. And the same thing applies to Canada. If we shut down our energy industry, which are bloody insane narcissistic, delusional, traitorous Prime Minister happens to think is a good idea and seems to be working as hard as he can to manage. All that’s going to happen is that we’re going to cede the ground to people like Putin, who we also turned into a radical enemy with his hands on the control pump for Europe.
I don’t see how we could be stupider here in the west if we actually took courses in stupidity and tried as hard as we could. We seem to be doing everything we can to break everything as rapidly as possible. And then I wonder too, has it got to the point where the people who think that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and there’s too many people on the planet think that this is some sort of like needles eye that we have to go through all this mass starvation and death so that we end up with a sustainable population? I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s a dim and grim scenario.
But as you said, why would you take the Dutch farmers out of business when they’re so unbelievably hyper productive and efficient? It’s just — it’s not like there’s too much food, especially not if we don’t have farmers.
MICHAEL YON: If anything, I would be trying to get a large agricultural institute here in Netherlands to teach other farmers how to be as efficient as Dutch farmers are, replicate these farmers in Afghanistan. Actually, many of the farmers coming over I was out in the farms quite a lot, were actually Dutch farmers to teach Afghans how to do things better.
But the bottom line is, as you can see, there is a huge I watch you all the time. You know what’s happening. There’s a huge authoritarian. The desire to have a one world order is clearly strong. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened. As you know, it’s a constant in human behavior. And also as somebody who studies the human psyche a lot, as you do, you realize pulling these farmers off of their traditional farms, unroots them. It cuts their anchor, their boat anchor. They’re going to be drifting culturally, so that makes them much easier. You can’t control farmers. Well, that’s why Stalin wanted to get rid of the farmers. You know, Stalin had to get rid of those farmers because farmers have a mind of their own.
Same with Mao. You got to get rid of those farmers because they think for themselves. And likewise here, these Dutch farmers think for themselves. And so they’re the bad guys; to me they’re the great guys. That’s our backbone. They are our backbone. That’s why I flew to the Netherlands from Mexico. I mean, that’s how important this is.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so what have you discovered on the ground there? You’ve been talking to farmers. Tell us, first of all, how the protests were organized, what their scope is and why the farmers are doing this and what they hope to accomplish.
MICHAEL YON: Well, actually, the farmers in Netherlands are amazingly cognizant of what’s happening. Many people that I talk with around the world don’t realize these other things, like the WEF and these sorts of things, but the Dutch farmers are talking about it in detail. They’re like, the nitrogen is nonsense, and it’s all about Klaus Schwab. And Bill Gates is trying to do this, and they’ll go into great detail. They know exactly what’s happening. They’re trying to take our land because of this, this and that and the other. And they know it. They’re not just like in Panama. It’s another story.
Panama is just like, give us cheap gas, give us cheap this and cheap that, and we’ll go home. Right. They’re easily satisfied. Not the Dutch farmers. They’re more sophisticated. These are serious players here. And again, that’s why I jumped on an airplane. If people like this are blocking streets around Netherlands, and we got the German farmers joining up with them, and they’re blocking the border together. German and Dutch farmers, right. Polish farmers. I love Poland. I spent two years there. Polish farmers are making videos in support of Dutch farmers. That’s how much it look. That started in Canada, jumped over to the United States. It’s over here now. I mean, it’s really growing. This courage is spreading.
And you see Italian farmers, Spanish farmers, people are rising up. And the more they realize what’s actually happening because the man behind the curtain is the WEF, the World Economic Forum. Of course, we’re going to have to deal with China. But at this rate, if Germany falls from these energy issues, which is looking pretty likely at this point, China is going to peel off the rock, too, right. As are we economically. Right.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: We cannot sustain the collapse of Germany. That’s absolutely, 100% obvious. That would be an utter bloody catastrophe.
MICHAEL YON: If Germany collapses, EU is gone for a while. The EU will probably dissolve. That’s my guess. I don’t know, we’ll see when time unfolds. But obviously that will take our economies with it. And China and Japan, and of course, Japan imports, what, 60, 70%? All these island nations and island state like Hawaii that import — Hawaii, 90% of their food imported, right. They are going to be in for a world of hurt. Japan imports most of its food. And some of these countries that I have to, I should say, maybe insulted the French for a while, years ago and saying, why are they defending all these small farmers all the time?
Now I see the French wisdom. These small farmers yeah. That resilience. When you go to France, and I’m sure you’ve been to France, small farmers everywhere provide a great deal of resilience. Right. And that’s why in the Netherlands, these farmers are vital for that. They’re as important as their army. I mean, without these farmers, you’re in somebody else’s pocket. Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, and also, if you lose the farmers for one generation, you lose all that knowledge. And I saw the government said, well, some of these farmers are just going to have to move it’s like, what are they going to do? They’re going to move their farm. How are you going to do that? You can’t move a farm. And it’s not like these things are just, what, transferable fungible in this simplistic manner. And so, yeah, it’s such a form of insanity. And it’s all justified by the fact that these half wit globalists are claiming constantly to be moral because they’re saving the planet.
And I know this literature, I know the planet saving literature, let’s say, because I studied it for about four years and in some depth, and I think I found the world’s thinkers who thought this through properly, and that would be Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg and Marion Tupy most particularly, and all three of them. And I would put Bjorn Lomborg at the top of that list. Those thinkers knew something fundamental and something so bloody optimistic that I couldn’t believe it was true when I first encountered it. Which was that if we really want to reach a kind of sustainable harmony with the planet the best way to do that, absolutely, obviously is to distribute autonomous free market systems as widely as possible and then to get people everywhere in the world as rich as we can, as fast as we can. Because the biggest contributor to environmental degradation isn’t industrial development, it isn’t the efficiency of the Dutch farmers, it’s absolute bloody poverty and privation. And the probability that people at the bottom of the economic distribution are going to fall into these catastrophic positive feedback loops that you described and devastate and lay waste to everything. As soon as you make people rich, the data on this are crystal clear.
As soon as you get people up to about $5,000 a year in gross domestic product, they start caring about the environment locally and autonomously. And so we’re in a situation right now where if our leaders weren’t so concerned with scoring cheap reputation points and being hyper moral in their ignorance and pretentious in their global ambitions, we could be working towards a world where everybody had enough food and enough education and were simultaneously inspired on their own account to engage in the kind of environmental stewardship that would leave a good planet for their children and their grandchildren. We could have our cake and eat it, too.
And yet what we’re doing is we’re breaking the supply chains and dooming the poor and fostering what’s going to be a mass migration into Europe. And that’s just going to be a bloody catastrophe. And I hate to see this, and I hope I’m wrong and I’m just being paranoid, but I don’t think so.
MICHAEL YON: I don’t think you’re being paranoid. Again I spend most of my time down range. I spend a lot of time in places like China, India. Just, good Lord, when you land in China, sometimes I wonder if my airplane is going to make it through the smog or we’re going to get stuck like amber in the smog. It’s so thick sometimes you can’t see the ground. It’s unbelievable.
And likewise with India, right? I spent almost a year in India and another year in Nepal, right, in Thailand, where I have an office. Sometimes you have to have air filters in every room because all of Asia is not all of Asia, but most of Asia is burning their farmland every year. You can see it in satellite. Look it up. I mean, it’s unbelievable.
So, I mean, this pollution that comes from poverty is quite intense. Not that China is poor and India, obviously is increasingly wealthy, but they have huge amounts of impoverished people and their factories still actually are behaving as if they’re poor. They’re dumping smog out unfiltered. It’s unbelievable. Anyway, we could go on about that forever. But the bottom line is the farmers are clearly under attack here in Netherlands. The German farmers also were very efficient. Again, I lived, sorry, four years in Germany. Their farmers are also under attack all across Europe.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: How many people are engaging in these protests right now? And are they raging as intensely now as they were a week or two weeks ago?
MICHAEL YON: My sense is that they’re actually growing. They’re not say going like, Panama was in Santiago last night in Panama, very violent and burning things and stealing police cars. They’re not doing that here. But you can see it’s a more intellectual at this point. It’s not gotten intensely emotional at this point yet, although I anticipate if the energy doesn’t get turned back on through the Nordstream, things are going to get emotional right. All across Europe, including here.
Now, most of the Dutch that I talk with, I was talking with a member of Parliament the other day, he was completely oblivious to the famines. Totally missing it. Right. And so this is kind of concern, and most of the Dutch people I speak with actually don’t seem to see that which is up. But these stores are nicely stocked in Netherlands. It’s a place of honey. It’s milk and honey here.
As you know, you’re a student of history, often before the storm, everything’s quite nice and the wine is flowing, and that’s the way it is right now.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And so I’ve read Western reports that it’s about 40,000 Dutch farmers, and so I don’t know what percentage of the farmers that is, and I don’t know if those numbers are anything approximating accurate. And I don’t know if you also are aware, no doubt you are, of what’s happening in Spain, where I understand there’s been about 100,000 people protesting. And so what’s the scale of this in Holland? And it’s growing into — the fishermen are also coming out in support of the truckers, as far as I’ve been able to tell. And if you want a job, that’s even more difficult than being a farmer, maybe being a fisherman would be the more difficult job.
And so what sort of scale are these protests manifesting at the moment in Europe, and how many countries do you think are involved? You said Poland, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands. Scale and spread —
MICHAEL YON: Italy as well. I’m kind of reticent to make that guess yet, and I’ve actually published about this many times over the years, whether I was in the fighting in Thailand or the fighting in Hong Kong, which I’ve spent many years in these sorts of things, and I’m often reticent to assign numbers. Now, the media might say 40,000 or whatnot. I know it’s a lot, let’s put it that way. And I do sense that it’s growing.
It’s not gripped the nation yet. It’s not reached that level at all. You see that the Dutch flag is often being flown inverted now, instead of red, white and blue, it’s blue, white and red. And now the Dutch government, about within the last week or so, said that they’re going to start taking those off of the overpasses because they present some sort of danger. The dangerous people will take a photo and put it on their social media. Right. And it’ll spread. In one town I think two days ago, said that they’re not going to do it, they’re just going to let them fly.
So the symbols are growing. I’ll meet more of the Dutch —
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, we want to focus on something here, too, for the enlightenment of the listeners and viewers. So I don’t know if there’s a more intelligently and compassionately and justly civilized country in the world than the Netherlands. So let’s think about that country.
First of all, it shouldn’t even exist. The Dutch had to literally drain the oceans and build walls just to make the country exist. And believe me, man, you bloody well better be organized in order to do that. And they did that hundreds of years ago and put together this unbelievable system of irrigation and drainage that ran on those amazing windmills, which are technological marvels. And Dutch society is unbelievably civil and peaceful and productive and interesting and culturally vibrant. It’s a great country. It’s a stellar miracle, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed out when she moved there from Somalia.
So we don’t want to underestimate the central significance of Holland and then obviously of the Netherlands. Obviously that country is predicated to some degree for its success on the provision of stable food supplies and these unbelievably efficient farmers. And so the fact that they are up in arms about all this is of signal symbolic and practical importance, which is why I think it’s so necessary to focus on their concerns and also so appalling that this isn’t headline news in every legacy media outlet across the west. Because when the Dutch farmers are upset and moving on mass the way they are, something has gone seriously wrong. This is a canary in the coal mine situation.
MICHAEL YON: It really is. And as you mentioned, the sophistication of these people in general, I mean, basically the Netherlands, the sophistication of building this country out of nothing. I mean, it’s basically flat pyramids, I call this. Just think of the pyramids flat. I mean, this is very difficult country to build and yet they did it back without modern machines. They did it just their brains and their brawn and they did it in persistence and organization. These are extraordinary. They’re not normal. They’re like Japanese, right?
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, they’re even taller, right? I think the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. And so I always feel like a shrimp when I go there. And metaphysically as well, because it is such a remarkable country.
MICHAEL YON: They are tall. I mean, they’re bouncing their head off the moon, it seems like, but extraordinary people. And thus came these extraordinary farmers, right? And thus they are an important target to take out for people like WEF. When you’re talking about information war and when you’re talking also the food supplies, I mean, this is just like every company, every invading army or whatever always has a budget, right? There’s only so much energy you have. And it’s the same with WEF. And so you need to concentrate your efforts to get things going in places like Russia and Ukraine and to get things going in Panama if they’re behind that, and also Netherlands.
So pick your targets. You’re going to pick vital critical nodes. And Netherlands is a critical node. There’s a lot of bang for the buck here by taking these farmers offline, and culturally as well, because once Netherlands is unmoored. Remember, this is meant to be the hub of Tristate City. Don’t forget Tristate City.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And what is that Tristate City? What’s the idea there?
MICHAEL YON: Tristate City is meant to be a mega smart city. The Tristates would be Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands, where those borders come together, this mega city that many Dutch have actually not heard of, and they will take this farmer’s land and make this mega city there and bring people from all over the world. And this is –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: To what end? What’s the rationale for that central plan? Okay, so what are the farmers hoping to accomplish, like in Canada? Part of the reason that the truckers convoy ended, I would say, and I would say it ended pretty successfully in many, many ways. First of all, they had the sense to end it before it degenerated into anything even vaguely approximating violence, which was extremely wise and conservative on their part and careful and compassionate, the opposite of all the things they were being accused of.
But part of the problem with the truckers protest, it wasn’t exactly obvious what the end goal was, you know. And so they were accused of fomenting rebellion and of wanting to produce a January 6 insurrection, which was basically what the bloody Trudeau Liberals accused them of and tried to convince Canadians of, and which the Americans, even Democrats, think is an utterly preposterous notion, and which was factually untrue to the nth degree.
But they didn’t exactly know what they wanted. They wanted the damn government to leave them alone, fundamentally, and stop mucking about with the energy economy and stop intervening in their life that made having the livelihood impossible. But it wasn’t more concrete than that end of vaccine mandates. That was part of it in the mass mandates. But what is it that the Dutch truckers want, apart from not being eviscerated and chased off their land?
MICHAEL YON: Well, I would say that the Canadian truckers protest didn’t end. It took on a life of its own. It spread. Spread in America and here now. And what do the Dutch farmers want? Mostly, they want to be left alone. They want to be farmers.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: They want to go back to work.
MICHAEL YON: They’re farmers. I mean, they’re business people. They’re all those things at once. They just want to be left alone. They want to be farmers. They have their own culture, and they just want to do what farmers do, which is farm and make money and graze their families and live life.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And feed other people, which is really nice of them, all things considered.
MICHAEL YON: And I think everybody watching this probably has somebody in their family who’s a farmer. Pretty much all of us are in some way tied to farmers, if not directly very close indirectly, the farmers, again, can’t understate this. The farmers are a backbone of this culture. And when it comes to information wars, whether that be Mao, Unmooring, Chinese, or the Russians doing this and creating the Soviet Union, you want to cut people from their boat anchors, cut them from their cultural anchors, and then they’re very easy targets for many things. For instance, genocide for one and another is menticide, right? Rape of the Mind, which is a great book, which was written in the Netherlands, right? Rape of the Mind, 1956. One of the best books on brainwashing I’ve ever read, written right here.
Because this has happened many times in the past, it’s going to continue to happen in the future. And one of the most important vaccines that we can take is to study cult making and mentacides and how these techniques are used against people. I’ve studied these things for years because when I was in Special Forces, people talked about, if you want to fight communism, you have to study cults, because communism is a cult, right? It’s got cult like components that are very important.
So I studied cults for years. I infiltrated the cult at one point. Actually, it was a cannibal cult that I tracked down, oddly enough, and infiltrated them. That’s an interesting topic. Yes, it was epic. But the point is, cults are cults, and the only cults people won’t see is the cult that they’re in. People will never see. And that would include me. If I’m an occult, I’m probably not going to see it. But everybody else can see it. Hey, that guy is an occult. And so the cult making of WEF, we can see clearly. They’ve got this climate cult, right? Everybody’s like, oh, we’ve got to do this, and we’re willing to kill people en masse to do it, even though we have no idea about this.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, let’s talk about that again. The reason I like Bjorn Lomborg because there are some concerns on the environmental front, like there always are. We’ve overfished the oceans to a terrible degree, and it would be better if we polluted the least possible and there is some evidence that human contributions to global warming are a genuine thing.
But I looked at the data as broadly as I possibly could on that front, and I concluded that Lomborg’s group in Copenhagen had the most intelligent approach to assessing the problem and offering solutions. And basically what Lomberg did was take the IPCC climate report and accept its prognostications on the global warming front as accurate.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean he believes that or that they are accurate, but he was willing to start there, and then he calculated with teams of economists and I don’t know how the hell else you do it, what the detrimental consequences for global GDP would be as a consequence of the proposed climate change. And then he projected out what our wealth increase would be by the end of 2100 at 3% or 4% a year growth, which is about what we’ve averaged for the last 30 or 40 years. And he calculated how less rich we would be as a consequence. It will be much richer than we are now, barring all the catastrophes that are man made that we’ve been discussing. But we’ll be slightly less rich than we would have been if there wouldn’t be climate change. And then Lomborg lays out a number of things that we can do to ameliorate the consequences of climate change. But he goes farther than that.
He said, look, climate change is not actually the only problem that we face. There’s a whole plethora of global problems which is part of the reason there’s like 200 UN sustainable development goals. And it isn’t obvious that we should be dumping trillions of dollars into climate change amelioration when we have other problems to solve as well. So he had ten teams of economists rank order the world’s problems as outlined in no small part by the UN. And say, look, if we were going to donate resources, if we’re going to devote resources to the amelioration of these serious problems, what are the most serious problems? And where can we get the most bang for our buck? And then he averaged across economists approximations of what the cost benefit would be in addressing these issues.
And what he found was that most of the issues having to do with climate change amelioration don’t even meet the top 20. They’re not even included in the top 20 for the things that we should be concentrating on most. And I read Lomborg’s work and I thought, well, I’ve never seen anyone do a more careful analysis of the entire situation than this. Does anybody have a counterargument? And the counterargument seems to be if you’re not a true believer in the apocalyptic climate nightmare, and if you don’t think that no measures, no matter how dramatic, are not even sufficient, then you’re basically an agent of Satan. And I just don’t regard that as a careful and nuanced argument. I think it’s appalling and it’s a reflection of the ignorance and Luciferian pretensions of the globalist utopians and their absolute inability of themselves to educate — to become educated on this front.
Well, sorry for the rant, but Jesus, this is serious business.
MICHAEL YON: And keep going.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, now they’re trying to shut down the bloody farmers. It’s like, what the hell’s going on here? We actually need food, especially poor starving people. Remember them? Socialists, aren’t those the people that you’re supposed to be on the side of? Well, all you’re doing with your idiot utopian globalism and your environmental apocalypse and your willingness to identify yourself as part of the moral elite because you care about the planet is dooming what Michael thinks a billion people to starvation. So what the hell? How is that moral?
Well, the climate problem is so serious that if we have to starve a few people to solve it, it’s like, fair enough, man. Let’s say you’re right. Well, you’re not. Because as soon as you make people poor, you make the environment worse. Period. The end. Not just a little bit worse, way worse. Radically worse. Just wait till you see what happens to Sri Lanka on the sustainable biological front.
Okay? Back to the Dutch farmers. So what’s going to happen in Holland and what’s going to happen in Europe? You said it’s dependent on whether the bloody Russians keep the taps off.
MICHAEL YON: What’s going to happen? I think about that approximately once an hour, because what’s going to happen this system is emerging. The LNG is now cut off. So a lot of these things that are important right now might seem unimportant just one month from now if that energy is not turned back on again, because this is going to cause an immediate cascade. And this summer will be over. Yesterday it was so hot here. Some places closed. It was only like, 99 degrees. Of course, I just came in from Mexico, so I’m good to go. I sweat, but I’m from Florida, right?
So, I mean and so they actually were closing some places here because it was too hot and some public transportation. It made me think, you know, this is actually kind of a minor challenge. This winter is going to be cold. This is a very serious deal. As you know, energy is a kill shot for food, right? If there’s not enough energy, they’re not going to be able to create the fertilizer and transport the fertilizers. We already saw a large fertilizer plant closed down in Norway and others as well. That’s just one of others.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And Ukraine and Russia are major sources of fertilizer production.
MICHAEL YON: And China has just stopped their exports as well, and many others. This is a cascade, and it’s almost like a Kessler send them cascade here. And at this point, I think there’s too much inertia to stop it at this point, I think we could have headed it off even a year ago if we suddenly had serious leadership across and we directly addressed WEF if we had a president –
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And no, what we have is leadership who meet and then laugh about Putin’s shirtless photos. That’s what we have instead of serious leadership. Yeah, we have a pack of –
MICHAEL YON: Many issues. The inertia is too heavy at this point. We’re going to see a lot of starvation and a lot of HOP – human osmotic pressure, the migration. And of course, this leads to pandemic. We’ll have real pandemics because, again, when you have many people starving, first of all, they start migrating and eating things they don’t normally eat, and their immune systems are depressed. Anyway bottom line is, every time you get big famines, you get big pandemics, which will create more war. We get that positive feedback loop.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, good then we can lock everybody again. Hey, that’d be real fun. We can lock everybody down again like they did in Shanghai, and then we can disrupt the supply chains even more. And then we can starve a bunch more people. And maybe we will settle out with 600 million people and have a sustainable planet with all those 600 million people living in the ashes and the skeletons, and with barrenness, and apocalyptic nightmare everywhere around them. That’ll be a hell of an outcome.
MICHAEL YON: It’s interesting because, you know, some people say, hey, that’s apocalyptic and doom and gloom. And I say, if you’ve looked at my work over the many years, you’ll see I’m actually very measured. I wouldn’t say something like this because I know that many people depend on me to get things right. So I research seven days a week, travel the world, talking with the right people, reading so many books you wouldn’t believe, and, and I try to figure out what’s going on, which is difficult, and but I do have a good track record, and I can see how the conditions are setting. It’s not about sparks. We see Panama, for instance, going in the wrong direction at this point, and that’s obviously vital. Panama Canal.
We see issues between Iran and Israel, which could cause other energy issues. Nordstream is cut. We’ve had the explosions in Texas, in Oklahoma, even if Nordstream were wide open, Europe’s got problem with energy this winter. That’s just a fact of life. Which means next year, remember, famine creates famine. Next year we’re not going to have enough fertilizer, period. We’re eating the food that’s already been grown at this point.
So right now, in addition to this, normally we have a lot more resilience. For instance, routes that we have in the United States, okay, we do have incredibly terrible droughts right now in the United States. Normally we could kind of fill in the gaps and it’s not going to be happy days, but we’ll fill it out, nobody’s going to starve to death. But now our resilience is reduced, and so we’re not going to be able to be sending food out to all over Africa and these sorts of places without starving our own people.
Now keep in mind, by the way, during famines, often countries like China were exporting huge amounts of food while their own people are starving. Mao was doing that; actually Stalin did that when Ukraine was starving. That’s a strange thing about famine. Some countries continue to export food while their people starve. But that’s a side topic.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, that is what you do when you’re aiming at starvation. Yeah, well, so you’re a lot of fun to talk to. Jesus, — I don’t know. Yeah, that’s an even more dismal conversation than the one I would have with myself, I would say.
Well, look, Michael, thank you very much for talking to me today and enlightening me and all of the people who are watching and listening about these preposterous and appalling occurrences. I sure hope you’re diluted and wrong, but I’m afraid you’re probably not. And that’s really sad and horrifying, and we’re going to be lucky if we get through this winter without major bloody catastrophe, as far as I can tell, on about five different fronts.
And this absolute abdication of leadership in the west, especially on the environmental front, is right at the forefront of all of this. And so, all right, for everyone who’s listening, I’m going to continue to talk to Michael behind the scenes, so to speak, at Daily Wire Plus. I’ve added that to my YouTube offering, or my online social media offering, let’s say as part of this daily wire deal. I have been talking to all my guests for an additional half an hour or so about the development of their career. Michael’s had an amazing life, I would say in about five different dimensions, and I would like to ask him how his interests unfolded and what pathway he followed and what his calling is, to use anachronistic biblical term. And that’s all offered at Daily Wire Plus, who have been kind enough to produce and film and edit and help distribute and publicize all of this work. That’s also part of the Daily Wire Plus deal, which I think is a good thing for everyone, including me and hopefully the audience. And so we’re going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus, and if you want to support the work they’re doing, which is at least in part, trying to bring actual journalism back into the world so that people know that famine is coming, for example, please give some consideration to offering them some support. We’re hoping to make the Daily Wire Plus into a reliable alternative news source, which means an actual news source in today’s world.
And I don’t know if we can manage it, but that is our aim. So, Michael, thank you very much for talking to me today. That was extremely interesting in the most horrible possible way. And kudos on your adventurous spirit, man, and your courage in the face of all this. God — you have a ridiculous life. It must be quite something to be trying to address these concerns conceptually and in the practical way that you’re doing it, traveling and so forth, and by keeping your ear to the ground, it’s an amazing thing that you’re doing. And so hopefully it’s going to tilt us away from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because they certainly seem to be on the march again, and that’s pretty bloody sad, to say the least.
So over now with everybody and Michael, as I said, and thanks very much for being to talk to me today.
MICHAEL YON: Thank you, Jordan. It has been a pleasure and an honor.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Thank you very much, sir.
For Further Reading:
America’s Invisible Crisis: Nicholas Eberstadt (Transcript)
Israel In The End Times: Derek Prince (Transcript)
Israel, Russia, China, Iran: The World in Conflict: Walter Russell Mead (Transcript)
The Natural Order of Money: Roy Sebag (Transcript)
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